Clay Face

Revisiting a medium I grew very fond of during my Foundation year - Clay.

It seems only natural now that I seem to be continuing the work I started during my year at Stockport College, that being the exploration of the face. I have always been extremely keen on drawing, and have produced more than a few portraits over the year, most of which are produced in pencil or charcoal, which I love working with.

I think that sculpting with clay is a direct result of this. just as with a pencil where you can easily erase, smudge or draw over or completely start over, the same is true of clay. The big difference is that it is such a physical and I think maybe a more personal thing, maybe because of the contact you have with your work throughout the creative process.

Anyway, I was looking for another way to explore my current project, which to use a quote from my statement on the "Creative Transit" web site is"

 "....currently contrasting how we present ourselves to the world with how the world sees us. The face that we show to the world can be perceived as a mask; it is quite often completely disconnected from how we are truly thinking and feeling. "

 Wire Maquette

I have absolutely now idea hoe this is going to work out, as I said,m this is not the way I normally approach working with clay, but thats all part of the adventure...

 

Well I'm not convinced by the result, but as I said this is the first time I haven't worked from a solid lump of clay and there is still some work to be done, so onwards......

Where the inner 'you' and the world collide

I am continuing my work that explores the way we present ourselves to the world and how the world actually sees us.

I have been using a combination of canvas and masks to create an environment where two worlds (the private you and the rest of the world collide), this is moving on from previous work where I was using the masks themselves as a canvas.

This is one of those areas where I don't think that there is an obvious end point to the exploration. There are potentially endless ways to depict emotion and the environment around us, and it will probably be something I re-visit repeatedly.

Happy/Sad

Empty Spaces?

The Collective You

Primary School Art Project

 I am very happy to say that yesterday afternoon I completed my first session of an art project at my local primary school. I have always had the idea that I wanted to do a project that was community based and I could think of a better place to start than the school that all my children have attended (and some still do).

when I first started the degree course I invented a game for my first summer project (see dice game blog from 2009) and soon as we had played it I knew that i wanted to try this with various groups of people to see what ideas could be generated  and this opportunity to work with children was ideal to try it out on a grander scale.

Over one very pleasant afternoon I played the game with three groups of fantastic children, who were all very enthusiastic and brimming with imaginative ideas. I have taken their work home with me to photograph and the resulting images and the original work will be returned to school on my next visit. At the end of the project we are going to use all the generated material to create a collage....or at least thats the plan so far.

Blank Media - Creative Transit

Aiming for a slot in March 2011, the hard working guys involved in the organisation of the "creative Transit Exhibition" at Blank Media finally managed to get an artist statement out of me to accompany the work that I intend to show:

Artist statement

Using painting, sculpture and photography and quite often combinations of these, Pete utilises various media to explore the world we don’t see; take for granted and sometimes would rather not think about.

He is currently looking at how we present ourselves to the world compared to how the world sees us. The face that we show to the world can be perceived as a mask, it is quite often completely disconnected from how we are truly thinking and feeling, the people around us only see what we want them to see (or what they want to see), unless we reached the point where we loose control.

This series of work is about creating a visual representation of the meeting of these two worlds, the inner self exposed and the outside world clashing, intruding and sometimes dominating the way we think and behave.

Site Project

I wanted to continue with my exploration into the way that we present ourselves to the world; the face we allow those around us to see, irrespective of the way we may actually feel.


Previously I have used masks that have been manufactured, to represent various emotions and physically hidden the identity of the wearer and created a barrier between the individuals’ expressions and the world around them. With this project I wanted to give a larger number of people the opportunity to show those they encountered in their daily activities the same emotion as everyone else who agreed to take part – a happy face.

The method that I came up with to do this was a simple one, hand out smiley stickers. So on the morning of 18/01/2011 armed with a large quantity of sparkling, vary sized smiley emoticon stickers, I walked around the All Saints Campus of Manchester Metropolitan University and asked people if they would like to take part in my project and I’m happy to say approximately 140 of those I approached agreed to do so.

I wanted to have two different facets of this project, static participants, those who lots of people would encounter throughout the day due to the nature of their work, reception staff, site employees and faculty members and the mobile ever changing populous of the campus – the students.

Hoardings Project

The Brief

You are required to produce a self portrait of you as a creative individual at this moment in time.
The project involves students making embellishments and customising a life size photo portrait of themselves which will be shot for them. Students need to have some digital imaging skills (or a friend who does). The plan is to create 120 life size or larger altered photo portraits to go in each of the Building site hoardings panels. Each panel is 2m high x 1 m wide.

The Image

Hopefully the image will appear with its 119 companions on the hoardings, sometime in the New Year and if funding can be aquired in a publication some time in the future.

Presentation of Shelter Project

Masks - Pete Kingsford / Thom Thatcher / Andrea De La Rubia
Face Gallery - Pete Kingsford
Wooden Painted Masks - Sasha

Just 4 weeks after the project was set and some intense day before the event editing, we manageeing said  to present all our efforts in a relatively well received manner.

due to the software that we had used to edit our film "masks" we found ourselves restricted as to how and on what we could show the film. That being said, I descovered that I could enable my laptop to show seperate applications on two different screens, which enabled me to play the movie and my personal slide project at the same time. One big sigh of relief and a lesson learnt for the future - Use different software and leave more time to try out differnt ways of showing work, (If this had been an exhibition I would not have been happy at all with the compromise I had to make).

Photo of mask project

After we had walked around and viewed everbody elses work we each had to comment the following:

1) What is the meaning that the work is communicating?

2) How effectively does the work communicate issues/ideas around shelter?

3) What could be improved? (production, communication, presentation, etc)

4) Give a mark 1-10 for how experimental the work was.

Although the feedback given was generally positive, there were quite a few closed comments. This meant that no real opinion of direction was given or examples of how people thought that this work could have been done differently or developed further in the future. For this reason there has been quite a lot of doubt cast on the effectiveness of asking for feedback at the moment of viewing and discussion has started on new ways of approaching this.